Introduction

Over the past few decades, the NBA has undergone a substantial transformation in terms of how basketball is played and how teams are constructed. NBA basketball once focused on defense, post-play, midrange jump-shots, and physical, interior scoring. However, this has changed recently, and the modern NBA now prioritizes spacing, pace, transition offense, and a reliance on three-point shots that we haven’t seen in any other era of the NBA. This change is frequently attributed to a faster pace or to players simply becoming better shooters. Though both factors play a role in shaping how basketball looks today, they do not fully explain the magnitude or persistence of the league’s offensive growth.

The key difference in the modern NBA is not necessarily just how often teams score when they shoot, but where those shots are taken from, and how frequently they attempt high value shots. The goal of this project is to trace how the three-point shot has reshaped NBA offenses and the game of basketball as a whole. Along with documenting this shift, this project also addresses the central question: in the modern NBA, does leaning into the three-point shot lead to winning? I’ll do this by first looking at league-wide trends, then move into how teams and players adapted to these shifts, and finish by tying these changes together with success.

League-Wide Offensive Transformation

The visualization below displays a league-wide view of offensive efficiency over time. It shows how average offensive rating, which is points scored per 100 possessions, has changed season-to-season. The animation emphasizes the trajectory of the league overall. Despite some dips and fluctuations, NBA offenses have gotten better and more efficient over time.

The steady, gradual upward movement displays that offensive improvements were not abrupt results of rules changes or brief trends, but the cumulative outcome of how the NBA has evolved. Like the eras before it, the modern NBA is the result of adaptation and experimentation over the years. By seeing the nature of these improvements overe time, we can examine more closely what changed on the court to drive these gains, particularly in the modern NBA.

What Changed on the Court

The league-wide rise in offensive efficiency over time shown earlier raises a question: what actually changed about the way that basketball is played to cause this increase. Two explanations that are commonly used are pace increases and shooting improvements. While these factors contribute to the modern NBA landscape, neither fully account for the offensive jump seen in recent seasons.

The below visualizations display league-wide average pace and true shooting percentage since 1980. Pace had historic highs in the early days of the NBA, but stabilized in the 1980s. It dipped during the late 1990s and through the 2000s, but its increase back to 1980s levels does not explain the offensive boom in recent years. True shooting follows a somewhat similar pattern, with a dip around the same time. While the NBA has seen an increase in TS%, the difference is not large enough on its own to explain the dramatic growth in offensive efficency

Together, these trends suggest that modern offenses aren’t scoring more simply because they are shooting more or making shots at a higher rate. The real change is in how teams are allocating their shots.

The Rise of the Three-Pointer

The most important strategic shift in modern NBA offenses has been the stark increase in three-point shots taken. The visualization below displays the, at first gradual and eventually rapid, growth in three-point shot attempts over time. The three pointer adapted from a specialized, marginal component of NBA offenses to a central feature of nearly every team’s offensive strategy.

The increase in three-point shooting volume coincides with a broader shift in shot selection across the league. As teams began to shoot more threes, they took fewer long midrange shots, while shots beyond the arc became more prominent, and shots at the rim and short midrange jumpers held relatively steady. The below visualization displays how the distribution of field-goal attempts by distance has changed in recent years, highlighting the spacing of the court in the modern NBA.

When paired together, these patterns underscore a fundamental change in offensive strategy. In the modern NBA, teams have structured offenses around higher value shot opportunities. This is seen both in the increase in threes, but also the steady level of shots at the rim and short midrange. Teams either want to end posessions with high-value shots like three-pointers, or they want to get easy, high percentage shots closer to the basket. This helps explain why although traditional efficiency metrics like pace and TS% measures have not drastically changed, offenses have greatly improved.

Teams Don’t Adapt Equally

As shown before, the league-wide trend is clear. Modern offenses have substantially improved, largely in part due to teams prioritizing higher value attempts in their shot-selection, particularly threes. However, not every team started raining threes at the same pace even though the NBA moved that direction overall.

Teams responded differently to the three-point surge. Some franchises were early adopters, most notably the Golden State Warriors. The Warriors, led by the “Splash Brothers” Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, played a pivotal role in expanding three-point adoption. Their success in the mid 2010s made other teams around the league reconstruct their rosters and offenses to be more three-point heavy. However, others adopted the trend more slowly, relying on traditional pathways to a strong offense. The modern NBA is not just defined by more threes, but also increased separation in play-style. The graphic below tracks how spread out teams are in three-point attempts, pace, and offensive rating. The increased variance in three-point attempts suggests teams are diverging strategically.

The variance plot displays how teams differ in offensive approach, but it does not show how stylistic choices relate to outcomes for individual franchises. The below interactive tool displays each team’s average deviation from league norms in winning versus losing seasons across several key metrics. For a selected team, the visualization displays how they differ in play-style from league norms in their losing seasons vs. winning seasons. The visualization does not display any information on shifts over time, but it does give a glimpse into what play styles specific teams have found success in and how strategy differs across the league.

Interactive tool: Team Playstyle Fingerprints (Shiny App) https://thaddeusfelten.shinyapps.io/NBATeamProfiles/

Though variation gives us insights on differing play-styles being present in the league, it still somewhat abstract. To make the variation more concrete, the interactive visualization below allows for direct comparison of two teams across seasons and different metrics. With this, we can see which teams were early adopters and which were slow to adapt, as well as how large the differences were on an individual basis.

Interactive tool: NBA Team Comparison (Shiny App)
https://thaddeusfelten.shinyapps.io/NBATeamComparisons/

With team styles diverging, the league shift towards threes is more than just preference and aesthetic. Three-point shot volume is a strategic choice with competitive implications. The next section moves from team-level differences to the player-level adjustments that made these strategies viable, setting the stage for examining whether three-point heavy approaches are associated with winning in the modern NBA.

Player-Level Adaptation: How Roles Changed

Though league-wide trends and shifts in team-level strategies tell us a lot about how modern basketball is played, shifts in strategy towards three point shooting also needed corresponding shifts in playstyle at the player level. Teams can’t just decide that they’re going to take a bunch of threes without a groundwork of players who could create opportunities, space the floor, and knock down those shots. As offensive scheming changed, so did the roles and responsibilities of the players.

One way to view this shift is the changes to offensive usage across positions. The below visualization demonstrates how usage rates have changed over time based on position. Guards consistently and increasingly take on the largest offensive load, emphasizing the importance of ball-handling, shooting, and decision-making on the perimeter. Wings remain somewhat stable, with flexible use both on the perimeter and interior. Bigs show a more complex pattern, dipping significantly during the 2000s before increasing in usage again.

Recently, the role of big men has changed dramatically. Rather than solely serving as post scorers and an interior presence, bigs have evolved to space the floor, giving them a larger role in modern perimeter-focused offenses. For most of NBA history, three-point shooting was almost exclusive to guards and wings. Bigs rarely attempted threes, and when they did, it was generally a situational outcome, not by the design of the offense. The visualization below highlights the rapid increase in three-point attempts by big men. In the mid 2010s their numbers began to rocket, marking the emergence of the “stretch big.”

Note: Tableau embedding cuts off right side of visualization, you must view in full screen to see full plot.

These player-level changes help explain what made the team-level shifts observed earlier possible. With the league shifting towards a three-point-heavy style of basketball, the players that shot the least amount of threes, bigs, needed to adapt their game the most. As a result, they saw a resurgence in usage, and allowed teams to construct lineups that had no holes and could consistently space. Teams could now change their strategies while improving efficiency.

Now that we’ve seen how offense has changed both at a team level and player level, the next step is to evaluate outcomes. In the next section, I’ll examine whether these adaptations translated to success.

Do More Threes Translate to Winning?

The league’s offensive evolution is clear; shot selection has dramatically shifted over time towards three-point shooting, and teams vary in how much they embrace this style of play. However, we have not yet seen what this actually entails for team success. Is three point shooting just a trend started by Steph Curry, or does it actually correlate with competitive success?

The league’s context changes over time, so this section will focus on relative three-point volume. This way, we can see how much a team leans into three-point shooting relative to the rest of the league.

Three-point attempt rate is normalized within each season to compare teams relative to their contemporaries. Binning and z-scores are computed separately by season to account for changes in league context over time.

The above visualization on the left displays each team-season’s win percentage compared to their three-point attempt rate relative to that season’s league average (standardized as a z-score). Teams are separated by era, as the trends are notably different depending on era. In earlier seasons, shooting more threes only appears weakly related to winning, wih the trend lines remaining relatively flat. In the modern era, however, there is a clear relationship between three-point volume and winning games. This relationship is underscored in the plot on the right. In this visualization, team-seasons are grouped into bins based on three-point attempt volume, and the distribution of win percentages is compared across these groups. It reinforces the same story that teams that shoot a high volume of threes tend to have higher win-percentages and less extremely poor seasons. As the league shifted towards more threes, teams that leaned into that shift tended to have more successful seasons. Though this success could simply be explained by the fact that threes are higher value shots, and thus put more points on the board, increased three-point volume has more implications than that. When teams take more threes and space the floor, the interior gets opened up. Defenders have to shift priority and need to make a decision between opening up the paint and closing out the shot, or just letting the offensive player take a wide-open three (which is not advisable). It’s pretty simple actually: more players on the perimeter means less players in the paint, which leads to easier shots at the rim.

One important note to make here is that these visualizations display association, not causation. The quality of players a team has is a large influence on their strategy, and teams with better players might shoot more threes simply because their players hit them more often. Still, the strength of the relationship indicates that threes are closely tied to how winning teams strategize in the modern NBA.

What Do Champions Look Like?

We’ve now seen how higher volumes in three-point shooting typically is associated with more wins. However, we haven’t seen yet how three point volume relates to what matters most, which is winning championships. The figure below compares NBA champions to league averages in the same season across several metrics.

Though some champions win differently, the majority of NBA champions since 2000 take more threes than average and increasingly have widened this gap. While we can see that the old trope, “defense wins championships,” holds true over time, modern champions are more likely to pair strong defense with heightened three-point shooting. This reinforces the idea that in modern basketball, threes aren’t just a preference, they are a central component to winning basketball.

Conclusion

The NBA has changed dramatically over the years, and recently, the driving force of this change has been the growing reliance on three-point shots. While the league once played at extremely fast tempos, modern offensive improvement happened even as pace leveled off and true shooting percentage stayed relatively stable. Across the league, offenses steadily shifted away from the midrange and began to focus on threes. Some teams embraced this change more than others, and for the most part, that paid off, as teams that take more threes in the modern NBA tend to win more games. Though this is not concrete fact across the board, and some teams (including champions) have found success with more traditional play styles, shooting more threes has become a competitive advantage. The modern NBA didn’t become more efficient simply by playing faster or players just getting better, it became more efficient by playing smarter and centering offenses around value, rather than tradition.